Voice Lessons

April 18, 2007

Michael Feingold tracks the evolution of two American dramas in revival, Inherit the Wind and A Moon for the Misbegotten. He labels them both “studies in lying.” Of Inherit, he pronounces, “If the issues aren’t engaged powerfully, Hughes’s staging keeps the personal combats lively and fluid.” On Moon: “This is big, grim stuff, which O’Neill tries to enliven with heavy helpings of folk comedy…. Howard Davies’s production lets you feel the bigness, though none of his performers are really up to it.”

Feingold lets fly at David Harrower’s Blackbird, about the aftermath of a rather unusual relationship: “Maybe you’ll care; I couldn’t.”

I hoped to aid and abetthe Accomplices but found Bernard Weinraub’s drama about attempts to involve America in saving Jews from Nazis an affecting history lesson, but not very much of a play. I also found my way to Losing Something, a woefully disappointing debut of a nifty new theatrical technology.

Elsewhere, Eliza Bent gets in the sack with Banana Bag and Bodice as they ready their new show The Fall and Rise of the Rising Fallen, soon to debut at P.S. 122. John Beer doesn’t go ape for David Zellnik’s Serendib, writing that this play about animal behavioralists, “Early on, [it] poses a fascinating question: How much of our supposed understanding of animals is based on pure projection? But Zellnik swiftly jettisons this puzzle to focus on that more familiar chestnut—-what do women want?”